locusmeus

RSS readers are a great invention; they let you keep up with news and blogs without needing to surf the web all the time to find out what’s new. I have quite a variety of feeds in mine and I follow personal blogs as well as technical ones, on a range of different subjects. Of course sometimes it happens that the same news hits me twice – especially when it was posted on a popular website first.

Yesterday afternoon however, it seemed there was no other news in the world than the fact that Safari is now available for Windows! As a web developer who still hasn’t bought any flavour of Mac, of course I jumped to the opportunity and immediately downloaded Safari 3 for Windows. Installation went really fast and painless, and before I could decide on where to surf first in this brand new browser, the apple.com homepage was there. Looked perfect too.

But then I looked up my own site.

And some other sites I built…

To see why my enthousiasm was gone instantly, take a look at these screenshots of my site on any contemporary browser (I call it Firefox 😉 ) vs the same site on Safari for Windows:

locusoptimus.com on Firefox

locusoptimus.com on Safari on Windows

Comparing various sites in both browsers shows that on some sites, Safari won’t display headings, anything between <em> or <i> or <strong> or even simple <span> tags, or certain list elements.

Thinking it was just me (comparing notes with John confirmed not everybody has these problems), I figured I must have b0rked my installation of XP or something, especially since I already encountered visibility problems in a game before, that also works on other people’s computers without fault. I nearly decided to do a complete re-install of XP today! Thanks to the fact that *everybody* seems to be blogging about the new Safari, I found this page today, where the consensus seems to be that this new Safari is really US-only, and just fails to work properly with any other OS than the US versions of Windows. Something to do with the UTF-8 encoding, which is indeed what I use on any new site I build. No idea what the encoding could possibly have to do with displaying headings in a browser, but it seems to be crucial here.

On one hand a relief that it isn’t just me, and even better, that I won’t need to do another reinstall of XP, but on the other hand a great disappointment, that even though Apple managed to get Safari out for Windows, I won’t be able to reap the benefit 🙁

About two weeks ago I was watching an episode of Will & Grace, in which Jack and Will are in a gym arguing about Jack’s behaviour, while in the mean time Will is doing sit-ups. Having seen the episode before (I think they’re funny enough to watch the re-runs), my mind didn’t need to pay much attention to follow their conversation, and it was wandering off: why do people go to a gym to do sit-ups – what’s the use? I answer myself: to stay fit of course. So, how come we have to do sit-ups to stay fit? Because we’re doing desk jobs, instead of physical labour like our grandparents and great grandparents and eh..even older ancestors.

At least physical labour has a purpose – after a lot of man hours involving the use of bricks and mortar a house appears, and bringing in the harvest from the land costs honest sweat. People worked hard, and they lived off the results of that physical work. It’s a shame to see a man do sit-ups, without any tangible results other than this one man staying fit (and perhaps a nice six-pack to look at). It’s basically a lot of energy being thrown away while the world has a shortage of clean non-polluting energy sources.

I figured all these empty sweat drops (as in empty calories which aren’t empty either) should be put to use somehow. And that’s where my “light bulb moment” (sorry for the Oprah-speak) happened:

Why don’t all these gyms and fitness clubs hook up their equipment to some giant capacitor or something, so that all the clerks and other non-physical-work-people can do something useful while they’re keeping fit? With the amount of gyms these days, this could produce quite a bit of electricity.

Today I discovered I wasn’t the only person thinking that fitness machines could produce electricity. Apparently there’s a plan for a snackbar (that’s what we call a fish & chips shop because here in Holland instead of selling fish to go with our chips, we prefer a whole range of other unhealthy snacks that combine nicely with our chips – which we almost invariably eat with a good dose of just as unhealthy mayonnaise by the way) in Amsterdam, where people have to ‘earn’ their unhealthy snacks by first providing all the electricity needed to prepare them. Snackbar “Mevrouw CAT” (Mrs. CAT)’s owner Jackie Simons is currently looking for a location in Amsterdam to start her business, which will have five bicycles, one rowing machine, and a stepping thing (what are they called in English?) ready for her clients. I seriously wonder if this business will take off at all, as the only time I ever go to the snackbar for chips, is when I’m too lazy or busy to cook a healthy meal, and I certainly won’t feel like cycling half an hour instead!

However, the idea behind this snackbar is not just to let people burn the calories they’re eating, but rather the same idea as I had when watching Will Truman doing sit-ups. Quoting Jackie Simons:

“In our continuously expanding society, people work up a sweat to keep their slim appearance. They’re hopping on step machines, rowing while all the time staying in the same spot, or pushing the pedals of their gym-bicycles. But up till now nothing happened with that energy.”

“If all sports centers in Amsterdam would hook up, an entire African village could be provided with electricity.”

source: Algemeen Dagblad (dutch newspaper)

And that’s exactly what I was thinking 🙂

After reading this article on Jakob Nielsen’s view on Web 2.0, I found this comic by Joshua Porter particularly funny 🙂

Yesterday I was watching[1] an introduction to the use of Silverlight from the MIX event. Netflix hired Avenue A | Razor Fish to create a “cross-platform media player” based on Silverlight, and demonstrated the result by showing the Netflix movie player on a Windows pc first, and then on a Mac as well. In the words of Darin Brown of Avenue A | Razor Fish with Neil Hunt of Netflix acting as the surprised and impressed person:

“This is about the universal web, so what about this experience on a Mac”
“Did you say on a Mac?”
“I said, on a Mac!”

Although the audience seemed to like this ‘cross-platformness’, the first thing I thought was what about Linux? Would it support Linux too?

Roy Schestowitz says Silverlight is evil, as it does not support Linux, and apparently it never will. So, when Darin said:

“With Microsoft’s .NET framework, the Expression Studio as well as Visual Studio, we now have all the tools in our hands for creative and technical control.”

this may not mean what he claimed it to mean, “unprecedented collaboration between our designers and our developers”, but rather creative and technical control over the web, by excluding the free and open source Linux platform.

So, as a not so technical person I have a question for all you techies out there: if Microsoft really wanted, would they be able to create Silverlight so that it could be supported on Linux too?

Update June 22:

Silverlight will run on Linux too. Good news I guess 🙂

[1] I had to use IE7 to watch it, as Firefox crashes every time I click the play button on the video – be warned!

They said it:

Spread the word!

Let your colleagues know about the survey.

So I’ll just be an obedient web designer:

😉

At last! After microformats, AJAX, Web 2.0, XFN, JSON, XML–RPC (etc. etc.), they finally came up with a new fancy word that I can not only pronounce and remember, but actually understand as well! POSH – Plain Old Semantic HTML! Yup, I can do that 🙂

It took nine whole months (duh!), but finally she’s here, John & Esme’s brand new daughter Alice.

Yesterday John sent me an email with some photos and a short video of the newborn girl and her mother, but of course I couldn’t blog about it before he did!

Now I can though, so here it is, blogged 🙂 (She’s cute too, isn’t she?)

This morning I noticed a new blogpost by Molly Holzschlag in my feedreader, titled “@media, Antarctica”. Curious as to what she had to say about @media, I read the post and followed the link.

Kudos to whoever came up with this one – I almost fell for it! 🙂

Yesterday, when I opened the wrapper on a magazine I’m subscribed to, a 4 page brochure fell out, advertising a one day seminar with the title “No Budget Marketing”. The subtitle: “New clients don’t have to cost anything!”.

Pleasantly surprised by the concept of “no budget” instead of the usual “low budget”, I looked inside the brochure. It showed a few appetizers and the day’s program. Quite interesting I thought, and I quickly skipped to the application form on the back of the paper. At the top were the terms & conditions, and as I read the second paragraph, it dawned on me that “no budget” of course, never really means “no budget”. The paragraph started with the sentence “After receiving your application, we will send you a confirmation and an invoice.”… Invoice? For a No Budget thing? Ah, there it is, in the third paragraph: “This seminar requires an investment in time and money: € 895.-.”

So much for finding clients for free… If I’d have that kinda money lying around, I’d be going to @media, which is two whole days with several excellent speakers and three evening events, all included for only £ 395.- which equals about € 580.- (okay, that’s the ‘early bird price’, but still, you get my point).

My 6yo is pouring himself a glass of juice in the kitchen, right next to the box of rice I had left open. So, while I put the lid back on, I tease him, saying “I’d better close this box quickly, before we’ve got rice with juice – you never know with boys…”. His immediate reply, straight-faced: “With girls you know even less.”